OPT Forward Deployed Engineering Jobs
Forward Deployed Engineering roles place engineers directly at client sites to build, configure, and troubleshoot software in real-world environments. For F-1 OPT students, these roles qualify as STEM OPT-eligible positions when the employer files an I-983 and the work is directly tied to your degree field.
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Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless. Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. That same passion for innovation that goes into our products also applies to our practices, strengthening our dedication to leave the world better than we found it! Most software engineering roles hand off testing to one team and operations to another. Here you own all of it. As a Software Engineer on Forge, you'll design, build, test, ship, and run the platform Apple's engineering teams build on, working closely with those teams to find where the infrastructure beneath them gets in the way and fixing it. Forge is part of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), within Apple's Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization, the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. Forge is building the platform Apple's engineering organizations can use to take a service from code to running in production. That path has traditionally run through a series of separate specialist systems. We are bringing it together on a common platform with a shared core, so a team goes from allocated capacity to a live production service without assembling the pieces themselves. Our job is to get teams to production quickly, on a platform that stays secure and reliable without them having to think about it. Our charter is deliberately wide and still growing, reaching from the physical fleet in the data center to the surfaces engineering teams build against, and extending into new environments and new classes of infrastructure as Apple's needs evolve. We are a small team with outsized reach, bringing an AI-first mindset to how the platform operates and improves itself, and the best work we do takes one team's hardest problem and turns it into a capability every team inherits.
DESCRIPTION
As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will embed with the engineering teams who use our platforms, then build the software that solves their problems. This is a software engineering-first role that goes well beyond feature development: you will sit with a customer team to understand their applications and workflows, translate ambiguous requirements into a technical design, write the production code, integrate it with existing systems, and stay with it through deployment and operational readiness. We run what we build, so you will also share an on-call rotation for the services the team owns — which is the fastest way to learn where the platform still falls short. The work spans Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed systems, and automation that reaches into public cloud, private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. You will also build AI-assisted capabilities — LLM integrations, and agentic workflows — along with the evaluations and quality controls that make those capabilities measurable and trustworthy enough to run in production. You will move comfortably from a technical discussion with an engineering customer to designing a solution, writing the code, and validating that it works reliably at scale. You will approach loosely defined problems with curiosity and sound judgement, and you will know when a recurring customer request should become a reusable platform capability rather than another one-off integration. You care about clean, maintainable code, thoughtful architecture, and operational reliability, and you are as motivated by simplifying an existing system as by building a new one. In a team with daring goals and real autonomy, you will take utmost ownership of what you ship — and measure your success by the engineering problems you solve and the lasting improvements you leave behind in the platforms other teams build on.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- 2-8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing and delivering production software
- Strong backend development skills in Go, or in a comparable language such as Rust, C++, or Python with the ability to become productive in Go
- Solid understanding of software architecture, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed applications, and relational data modelling
- Hands-on experience with relational and distributed SQL databases such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, Aurora, or CockroachDB, including schema design, migrations, query performance, and connection management
- Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, subnetting, routing, TLS, and DNS record types, together with practical load balancing experience across L4 and L7, health checks, session affinity, and DNS-based global traffic management such as Route 53 or an equivalent
- Experience with a major cloud provider such as AWS, GCP or AliCloud, across compute, storage, networking, load balancing, and identity and access management
- Working knowledge of Linux, including systemd, processes, filesystems, permissions, and command-line troubleshooting
- Understanding of service-to-service authentication and transport security, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle, OIDC, and RBAC
- Familiarity with software delivery practices including source control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production deployments
- Experience operating services in production, including observability with metrics, logs and traces, incident response, and root-cause analysis
- Demonstrated technical leadership on multi-team projects — driving alignment, influencing partner teams, and raising the engineering bar around you
- Ability to work from loosely defined requirements, evaluate implementation options, and choose a practical path forward
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work directly with engineering customers
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
- Experience building modern front-end applications with React and TypeScript, including component-based UI development and API integration
- Experience building internal platforms, infrastructure automation, developer tooling, or enterprise software integrations
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containers, and deployment tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, or Ansible
- Experience building or operating distributed systems, including control planes, job orchestration, work queues, or state reconciliation
- Depth in multi-region data consistency — locality-aware schema design, follower reads, or partitioning in CockroachDB, Spanner, or equivalent
- Experience across hybrid and multi-region infrastructure, including private cloud, virtual machines, and bare-metal systems
- Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Splunk
- Experience with network virtualization, software-defined networking, or data center network architecture
- Experience with progressive delivery practices such as canary releases, blue/green deployments, and automated rollback
- Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs — prompt development, tool and function calling, multi-step workflows — and developing AI evaluations, agentic workflows, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations
- Demonstrated ability to turn customer-specific requirements into reusable software and platform capabilities
Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant
At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.
Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.
SUMMARY
Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless. Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. That same passion for innovation that goes into our products also applies to our practices, strengthening our dedication to leave the world better than we found it! Most software engineering roles hand off testing to one team and operations to another. Here you own all of it. As a Software Engineer on Forge, you'll design, build, test, ship, and run the platform Apple's engineering teams build on, working closely with those teams to find where the infrastructure beneath them gets in the way and fixing it. Forge is part of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), within Apple's Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization, the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. Forge is building the platform Apple's engineering organizations can use to take a service from code to running in production. That path has traditionally run through a series of separate specialist systems. We are bringing it together on a common platform with a shared core, so a team goes from allocated capacity to a live production service without assembling the pieces themselves. Our job is to get teams to production quickly, on a platform that stays secure and reliable without them having to think about it. Our charter is deliberately wide and still growing, reaching from the physical fleet in the data center to the surfaces engineering teams build against, and extending into new environments and new classes of infrastructure as Apple's needs evolve. We are a small team with outsized reach, bringing an AI-first mindset to how the platform operates and improves itself, and the best work we do takes one team's hardest problem and turns it into a capability every team inherits.
DESCRIPTION
As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will embed with the engineering teams who use our platforms, then build the software that solves their problems. This is a software engineering-first role that goes well beyond feature development: you will sit with a customer team to understand their applications and workflows, translate ambiguous requirements into a technical design, write the production code, integrate it with existing systems, and stay with it through deployment and operational readiness. We run what we build, so you will also share an on-call rotation for the services the team owns — which is the fastest way to learn where the platform still falls short. The work spans Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed systems, and automation that reaches into public cloud, private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. You will also build AI-assisted capabilities — LLM integrations, and agentic workflows — along with the evaluations and quality controls that make those capabilities measurable and trustworthy enough to run in production. You will move comfortably from a technical discussion with an engineering customer to designing a solution, writing the code, and validating that it works reliably at scale. You will approach loosely defined problems with curiosity and sound judgement, and you will know when a recurring customer request should become a reusable platform capability rather than another one-off integration. You care about clean, maintainable code, thoughtful architecture, and operational reliability, and you are as motivated by simplifying an existing system as by building a new one. In a team with daring goals and real autonomy, you will take utmost ownership of what you ship — and measure your success by the engineering problems you solve and the lasting improvements you leave behind in the platforms other teams build on.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- 2-8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing and delivering production software
- Strong backend development skills in Go, or in a comparable language such as Rust, C++, or Python with the ability to become productive in Go
- Solid understanding of software architecture, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed applications, and relational data modelling
- Hands-on experience with relational and distributed SQL databases such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, Aurora, or CockroachDB, including schema design, migrations, query performance, and connection management
- Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, subnetting, routing, TLS, and DNS record types, together with practical load balancing experience across L4 and L7, health checks, session affinity, and DNS-based global traffic management such as Route 53 or an equivalent
- Experience with a major cloud provider such as AWS, GCP or AliCloud, across compute, storage, networking, load balancing, and identity and access management
- Working knowledge of Linux, including systemd, processes, filesystems, permissions, and command-line troubleshooting
- Understanding of service-to-service authentication and transport security, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle, OIDC, and RBAC
- Familiarity with software delivery practices including source control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production deployments
- Experience operating services in production, including observability with metrics, logs and traces, incident response, and root-cause analysis
- Demonstrated technical leadership on multi-team projects — driving alignment, influencing partner teams, and raising the engineering bar around you
- Ability to work from loosely defined requirements, evaluate implementation options, and choose a practical path forward
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work directly with engineering customers
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
- Experience building modern front-end applications with React and TypeScript, including component-based UI development and API integration
- Experience building internal platforms, infrastructure automation, developer tooling, or enterprise software integrations
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containers, and deployment tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, or Ansible
- Experience building or operating distributed systems, including control planes, job orchestration, work queues, or state reconciliation
- Depth in multi-region data consistency — locality-aware schema design, follower reads, or partitioning in CockroachDB, Spanner, or equivalent
- Experience across hybrid and multi-region infrastructure, including private cloud, virtual machines, and bare-metal systems
- Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Splunk
- Experience with network virtualization, software-defined networking, or data center network architecture
- Experience with progressive delivery practices such as canary releases, blue/green deployments, and automated rollback
- Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs — prompt development, tool and function calling, multi-step workflows — and developing AI evaluations, agentic workflows, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations
- Demonstrated ability to turn customer-specific requirements into reusable software and platform capabilities
Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant
At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.
Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.
See all 59+ OPT Forward Deployed Engineering Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new OPT Forward Deployed Engineering Jobs.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding OPT Sponsorship in Forward Deployed Engineering
Confirm your degree aligns with the role
Forward Deployed Engineering requires hands-on technical work, typically in software or systems engineering. Your OPT authorization must match your degree field, so confirm the job description reflects the discipline on your EAD before applying.
Prioritize employers with I-983 experience
STEM OPT extension requires your employer to submit a formal training plan. Ask recruiters early whether they have filed I-983 forms before. Companies that have sponsored STEM OPT students previously move faster and make fewer compliance errors.
Clarify client site work authorization logistics
Forward Deployed Engineers often work at client locations, not the sponsoring employer's office. Confirm your employer understands that OPT authorization is tied to your primary employer, not the client site, to avoid compliance confusion during onboarding.
Document project outcomes for your I-983 training plan
Your STEM OPT training plan must connect your daily work to your degree. Keep records of technical projects, client deployments, and engineering outcomes. This documentation supports both your I-983 and any future H-1B visa petition from the same employer.
Ask about H-1B sponsorship before accepting an offer
OPT has a hard end date. Before committing to a role, ask directly whether the company sponsors H-1B visas and has done so recently. Companies deploying engineers at client sites vary significantly in their willingness and capacity to sponsor long-term.
Account for travel requirements in your OPT planning
Forward Deployed roles involve frequent domestic or international travel. International travel on OPT requires a valid visa stamp, current EAD, and employer support letter. Plan reentry logistics carefully, especially if you travel during an active STEM OPT extension period.
Forward Deployed Engineering OPT: Frequently Asked Questions
Does Forward Deployed Engineering qualify for STEM OPT extension?
Yes, if the role is technical in nature and directly tied to a STEM-designated degree field such as computer science, software engineering, or a related discipline. The employer must complete Form I-983 and create a formal training plan outlining how the work develops your STEM skills. Roles that are primarily client management or sales, even with an engineering title, may not qualify.
Where can I find Forward Deployed Engineering jobs that sponsor OPT students?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for F-1 OPT students and surfaces Forward Deployed Engineering roles at companies that actively work with international candidates. Searching general job boards wastes time because most listings don't indicate sponsorship willingness. Migrate Mate filters for OPT-compatible employers so you're not applying blind.
Can I work at a client site as an OPT student without violating my work authorization?
Yes, but your employment authorization is tied to your employer of record, not the client location. The company that filed your I-983 or is listed on your training documentation is your legal employer. Working on client projects through that employer is standard practice in Forward Deployed roles and does not violate OPT rules, as long as the engagement is supervised by your authorized employer.
What happens to my OPT if I switch from a Forward Deployed Engineering role to a different position at the same company?
A change in job function can affect your STEM OPT if the new role no longer aligns with your degree field. You must update your I-983 training plan to reflect the new position and have your employer sign off on the revised plan. Notify your DSO promptly, as any material change to your employment must be reported within your program's required reporting window.
Do Forward Deployed Engineering roles typically lead to H-1B sponsorship?
Many companies that hire Forward Deployed Engineers are mid-to-large enterprise software or consulting firms, which often have established H-1B sponsorship processes. However, sponsorship is not guaranteed. The technical nature of the role strengthens an H-1B specialty occupation argument. Ask directly during the offer stage and request to speak with the company's immigration team or legal counsel before signing.